Moderator: So, Jo, organisations don't exist in a vacuum, so what factors would influence an organisation?

Jo: You're absolutely right, so projects sit within an organisation, and an organisation sits within a context which we call the environment, and we really need to understand that. So, we look at the political factors, that might be local, national, and international government initiatives and directives. We look at the economic environment, so what are the interest rates? What's inflation looking like? We can also look at the social-, set-up of our environments, so what are the, sort of, the hot topics for society at the moment? Technology, technology's changing all of the time and that will really influence-, the options that we look at. There's always shedloads of legal, as well, different initiatives that we need to, to be aware of, and then there's the environment itself. So, if we're decommissioning a, a building, actually what are we going to do with all that waste? So, that's generally known as PESTLE, it's an easy acronym to remember, PESTLE.

Moderator: So, should organisations avoid change?

Jo: No, absolutely not. So, we just need to make sure that change is beneficial, and that it's strategically aligned, and if you try to avoid change, you're not gonna survive a changing environment. We've had the pandemic, and those organisations that have managed to analyse the environment and swiftly change through good practices of project management, have come out a lot better than those who haven't. So, no, change isn't something you should avoid.

Moderator: So, where does uncertainty come from?

Jo: It comes from everywhere. Projects are unique, they're usually things we haven't done before. So, we don't know who our stakeholder's going to be, so we need to do some stakeholder engagement work. We might not understand fully the technology, and the risks, and the opportunities that come from that technology. We might not know where our suppliers are gonna-, going to be coming from at, at the beginning of a project, and of course, the context that we talked about earlier, PESTLE, you know, we don't know what this environment looks like fully, and we really need to look at that and understand it before we get started, and, kind of, manage that uncertainty.

Moderator: So, what we can take from this is PESTLE is a great way of identifying uncertainty, and we can look at the political aspects, the economic aspects, the sociological side of things. We can look at technology. We can look at the legal side of things as well, and we can take in the environment, looking at all of these areas to identify areas of uncertainty for our projects or organisation.

Environment | PMAPMIC-BL |

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